Whereas writing my ebook of prayers, Prayers for the Pilgrimage (IVP, 2024), I had loads of alternative to learn and familiarize myself with a spread of books each on prayer and of prayers, together with:
Within the checklist beneath, I give you my prime eleven books on and of prayer. Whereas removed from exhaustive or definitive, they’re books that I’ve returned to repeatedly over the previous few years.
My hope is that they may function attainable starters on the matter of prayer in addition to encouragements to a renewed behavior of prayer.
Bonhoeffer’s ebook on the Psalms is a basic for a cause. Functioning as an knowledgeable information to the Bible’s personal prayer ebook, it has additionally served for many years to nurture Christians in the way in which of prayer—gutsy, honest-to-God prayer.
Following Luther’s lead, Bonhoeffer frames his studying of the Psalter in mild of the Lord’s Prayer, and exhibits how praying the Psalms is our approach of praying the prayers of Christ himself. In our imitation of Christ, in different phrases, we pray what he prayed. We additionally pray what he fulfilled in his personal life: the Psalms.
On this approach, the Psalms prepare us in trustworthy praying and trustworthy dwelling. “It’s not our prayers that interpret the Psalms,” writes Bonhoeffer, “however the Psalms that interpret our prayers.” Simply so.
Very like Bonhoeffer’s ebook, Peterson takes readers into the marrow of the Psalter with the intention to assist them to find the center of prayer. “Removed from being beauty language,” Peterson writes, “poetry is intestinal language. It’s language that helps us to hope.”
Peterson exhibits how the Psalms convey us into the big nation of God’s creation and salvation. And in praying the Psalms, he argues, we study to grow to be increasingly ourselves within the firm of the trustworthy. The Psalms, Peterson concludes,
are God’s reward to coach us in prayer that’s complete (not patched collectively from emotional fragments scattered round that we probability upon) and sincere (not a sequence of kind of honest verbal poses that we predict may please our Lord).
3. Each Second Holy, by Douglas McKelvey
Left to our personal units, we frequently pray lower than we ought to hope and never sufficient of what we may pray.
Whereas God definitely welcomes all our clumsy, confused, half-hearted prayers, he additionally invitations us to tackle our lips the prayers that others have crafted. This contains the prayers of the psalmists and the prayer that our Lord taught his disciples. But it surely additionally contains the prayers of saints each previous and current.
Such is the case with Douglas McKelvey’s ebook of liturgies, Each Second Holy. His prayers have enabled me to convey earlier than God all of the components of my life, not simply the so-called religious components. For that, I’m deeply grateful.
A number of favourite liturgies embrace:
- “For College students & Students”
- “For These Who Have Not Achieved Nice Issues for God”
- “For the Loss of life of a Dream”
- “For These Who Can’t Sleep”
4. A Prayer Journal, by Flannery O’Connor
In a journal saved by the then-twenty-one-year-old Flannery O’Connor while learning on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and saved solely from January 1946 to September 1947, we witness the earnest prayers of a author who would come to outline the panorama of artwork and religion within the latter half of the 20 th century.
Each brutally sincere and wincingly self-aware, O’Connor gives readers not solely a glimpse into her personal prayer life but additionally permission to hope comparable prayers. “I have no idea you God,” O’Connor writes, “as a result of I’m in the way in which. Please assist me to push myself apart. … I don’t want to presume. I need to love.” Right here, we glimpse the center of 1, at prayer, who in time would disclose the confused coronary heart of modernity in her brief tales and novels with the intention to assist her readers uncover, as if for the primary time maybe, the center of the incarnate God.
5. Prayer, by Karl Barth
Though Karl Barth may not be the primary theologian that involves thoughts when one thinks of the subject of prayer, Barth devoted 540 pages to prayer over the course of his life’s work.
Drawn from a sequence of lectures that the Swiss theologian gave in French at Neuchâtel between 1947 and 1949, this exposition of the Lord’s Prayer exhibits Barth at his finest: as a theologian who firmly believes that the primary and fundamental act of theological work is prayer.
Undertaken in dialog with each Luther and Calvin, Barth identifies the Lord’s Prayer because the breviary of the entire gospel, and to hope this prayer is to hope by the mouth of Christ himself.
In displaying us what theology as prayer appears like, then, not merely a theology of prayer, Barth rightly exhibits all theologies to be bankrupt which don’t immediate us in the beginning to hope.
6. Assist, Thanks, Wow: The Three Important Prayers, by Anne Lamott
Written for the nones and dones in thoughts, Lamott retains prayer refreshingly easy on this slim however winsome ebook. Solely three prayers are wanted, she insists:
- Assist
- Thanks
- Wow
“It is a exhausting planet,” she writes, “and we’re a susceptible species. And all I can do is pray: Assist.” However to maintain us from getting caught in a vicious cycle of “assist” prayers, Lamott recommends that we pray “thanks” and “wow,” too. But nonetheless and no matter we pray, she suggests “we depart the ends in God’s good palms.”
One needn’t purchase Lamott’s theology wholesale, it needs to be mentioned, with the intention to respect the window she gives us into the center of the wanderers and wounded of our age who desperately ponder whether there’s a God who hears and heeds our prayers.
For these of us who had been raised to assume that there have been solely 4 methods to hope—adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication—Foster gives each a tour de drive as regards to prayer and a tour by the historical past of Christian practices of prayer.
From the “prayer of tears” to the “prayer of relinquishment,” from the Examen prayer to the Therapeutic prayer, from the “atypical” prayers to the “sacramental” prayers, Foster’s Prayer invitations readers into the lifetime of the Holy Trinity and in so doing invitations them to be caught up in one thing a lot greater even than our types and habits of prayer: the transformative presence of God himself.
On this gem of a ebook, Nouwen outlines three indispensable disciplines to the religious life:
- Solitude
- Silence
- Prayer
Deriving from a seminar which he taught at Yale Divinity Faculty on the spirituality of the fourth-century desert fathers and moms, The Manner of the Coronary heart carries readers by the center of prayer, which, for Nouwen, includes an immersion within the lifetime of the Spirit of God.
“The prayer of the hesychasts,” writes Nouwen, “is a prayer of relaxation. This relaxation, nonetheless, has little to do with the absence of battle or ache. It’s a relaxation in God within the midst of a really intense day by day battle.” That is the sort of excellent news that Nouwen gives his readers, a mingling of hope and honesty, and a delicate main of the reader to expertise the presence of God in prayer for themselves.
Hauerwas insists {that a} theology course that doesn’t start with prayer is a category not value instructing. “Any theology,” Hauerwas writes, “that’s lastly not about serving to us to hope can’t be Christian.” But he additionally has no bones about his incapacity to hope nicely off the cuff.
Begun throughout his early years at Duke Divinity Faculty, Hauerwas took up the behavior of writing out his prayers earlier than every class. Swearing off any must sound “pious,” nonetheless, he selected as an alternative to say issues as plainly as attainable, although with sufficient eloquence as the person prayer demanded. His prayers embrace responses to warfare, dying, betrayal, and the suicide of one in every of his college students, together with issues like magnificence, forgiveness, rising outdated, and, in fact, God.
“God needs our prayers and the prayers God needs are our prayers.” That’s what Hauerwas wanted to listen to himself—and maybe the remainder of us, too.
Having grown up in a convention that would hardly conceive of God’s curiosity within the mundane circumstances of life, the invention of this ebook by this seventeenth-century Carmelite lay brother proved to be a breath of contemporary air throughout my school years.
Comprised of each letters and data of his conversations saved by the Abbé Joseph de Beaufort, The Observe of the Presence of God data Brother Lawrence’s ruminations on a life spent largely within the kitchen and, in his later years, repairing sandals.
“Lord of all pots and pans and issues,” writes Brother Lawrence (1611–1691), “make me a saint by getting meals, and washing up the plates.” We may substitute right here “writing emails,” “operating errands,” “doing chores,” or “doing taxes,” and really feel afresh the excellent news included on this basic of religious theology.
When the 2020 pandemic hit, I started a day by day follow of writing collects, a type of prayer that dates again to the fifth century. For me, it was, at first, a approach to deal with my fears over an unpredictable future. In time, it turned a religious follow—after which a ebook.
Accompanied by a sequence of work by my spouse, Phaedra, and comprising greater than 4 hundred prayers, Prayers for the Pilgrimage contains prayers for morning and night, work and play, doubt and religion, and from Creation to Lent, and delivery to dying.
Amongst others, I’ve written prayers “For Dashed Plans,” “For a Mid-Life Disaster,” “For Altering a Diaper at Night time,” “For Our Wounded Nation,” “For Pets, “For Sermons,” “For Single Dad and mom,” “For Enemies,” “For VBS,” and “For When Issues Don’t Go In line with Plan.”
